DragThing is written using the 32-bit Carbon APIs that Apple have
now removed in macOS 10.15 Catalina. It will no longer run if you
update to Catalina, and there are no plans to make a new version
that will.

We are sorry to say, DragThing has launched its last app.

64-bit support would require completely rewriting the code from
the ground up, a process which would take us at least a year to
complete, with no guarantees we could re-implement all the
existing functionality, or how much of a future it would have
if we did.

DragThing’s heyday was back in the classic Mac OS era, but it was a very credible utility in the early days of Mac OS X as well. It was the Dock before Mac OS had a built-in dock. And TLA founder James Thomson actually worked for Apple and helped create the Dock — it’s a complicated story.

DragThing hasn’t been updated in years — it wasn’t even updated to support retina displays. It was felled not by the transition from classic Mac OS to OS X but by the gradual sunsetting of Carbon APIs. But it’s the sort of app that is going to make some users sad that MacOS 10.15 Catalina has dropped 32-bit app legacy support.

I haven’t used DragThing in many many years, but for a long time it was essential to my workflow, and I firmly believe it was a much better launcher than Apple’s own system Dock ever has been. DragThing had features — like the ability to create custom palettes that only appeared in a certain app — that I don’t know how one would replicate today.